"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Black Dynamite, "The Wizard of Watts," and Bob's Burgers, "Speakeasy Rider" (tie)

On some Fridays, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

Adult Swim's animated Black Dynamite is at its weakest when it's recycling sight gags from the 2009 film of the same name (which Black Dynamite star Michael Jai White co-wrote), like when the cold open of "The Wizard of Watts," the show's ambitious second-season finale, runs into the ground the film's funny absurdist gag where Dynamite's sexual prowess is so great he's able to give multiple women in the same bed orgasms at the same time. Dynamite may be able to get half the population of '70s L.A.'s hottest honeys off, but it doesn't get the finale off to a good start.

It's a crazy gag I liked so much during the film--because it makes no anatomical sense at all--that I kept hoping the animated version would never rehash it. But it ended up rehashing it, and not just in "The Wizard of Watts," but earlier in the second season as well. That's my biggest problem with the animated Black Dynamite or any other animated small-screen version of a live-action movie: there's no need to remind viewers of all the scenes we loved in the original (hell, it's also a problem with movies that are sequels to classic comedies, which is why I was relieved when White announced that his next movie with Black Dynamite director Scott Sanders will most likely be an unrelated comedy featuring White and his Black Dynamite co-stars as new characters instead of a Black Dynamite sequel). As kids, we enjoyed The Real Ghostbusters not because of the countless times Peter Venkman would get slimed by Slimer just like in the original Ghostbusters, but because of the effective ways The Real Ghostbusters expanded upon the Ghostbusters universe, thanks to the efforts of a pre-Babylon 5 J. Michael Straczynski as the show's story editor, as well as a few genuinely funny jokes that weren't in the 1984 film, like the moment when a demon opened a thick book that listed his least favorite creatures on Earth and he flipped past a page that said "Mimes." Re-establishing the animated show's connections to the original source material is just lazy writing, when time can be better spent coming up with new comedic material, like any moment where Dynamite finds himself literally tangling with the evil '70s kids' show puppet That Frog Kurtis (J.B. Smoove), an enjoyable antagonist who makes a long-overdue reappearance in "The Wizard of Watts" and is a character that the 2009 film would have been incapable of pulling off due to both budgetary and live-action limitations.

The rehashed multiple-orgasm gag is a glaring misstep (this show is capable of coming up with cleverer ways to depict Dynamite's month of fighting and fucking), while the rest of the hour-long "Wizard of Watts" is the animated Black Dynamite at its best, whether it's demonstrating why White, who's otherwise known as a star of straight-to-DVD action flicks like the beautifully choreographed MMA fight film Blood and Bone, is a pretty skilled comedic actor (he doesn't overplay the humor) or offering a demented comedic spin on not-so-funny subjects like Donald Sterling's racist attitudes and racially motivated police brutality. The finale was written about a year before the nationwide furor over both Ferguson and Eric Garner's death at the hands of the NYPD (showrunner and episode co-writer Carl Jones' attempt to make the episode more up-to-date by dubbing in audio of Honey Bee saying "I can't breathe" during a riot scene screams out "last-minute"). "The Wizard of Watts" has to be one of the few pieces of television that made me laugh at something so wrong: the sight of Rodney King--he's depicted here as an orphan at the Whorephanage and referred to during the episode as "Little Orphan Rodney King"--getting a beatdown from cops. If you're uncomfortable with humor being mined from the sight of children getting beat up, stay away from "The Wizard of Watts." Honey Bee's big musical number in the episode has her slapping around unruly orphans at the Whorephanage with '60s Batman-style onomatopoeia filling the screen.

"The Wizard of Watts" presents what has to be the world's first parody of the '70s Broadway hit The Wiz. (Let's just forget the unsuccessful 1978 movie version with a badly miscast Sidney Lumet and an ill-suited-to-be-director Diana Ross existed. Get it? Because Diana Ross bossed around both Universal and Motown in order to become part of... Okay, you get it.) The episode jokingly refers to its vision of Watts-as-Oz as "the black version of The Wiz" and places Dynamite in the Dorothy role, a leg-humping, foul-mouthed poodle named Broto (rapper/Loiter Squad star/extraneous comma lover Tyler, the Creator) in the Toto role and the Wicked Bitch of the Westside (Tim Blake Nelson), a pig from the LAPD who's literally a pig, in the nemesis role. The musical numbers in "The Wizard of Watts," which are riffs on both The Wiz's show tunes and '70s hits like the Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight," exemplify why second-season composer Fatin "10" Horton has been a nice addition to the show: he's like a less family-friendly Weird Al, perfect for the animated Black Dynamite's profane--and according to Jones, "socially irresponsible"--brand of humor.

My favorite numbers in this episode are the ones based on "Don't Nobody Bring Me No Bad News"--Dynamite's chicken-and-waffles chef friend Roscoe sings about both the joys of "mixing Fiddle Faddle, chitlins and fondue" and his promise to "never bring you no fucked-up food"--and "Home." Yes, White himself attempts to sing this episode's version of "Home," without the aid of Auto-Tune to make him sound on-key, and it's one of the funniest things this show has ever done. White once explained in the 2009 Black Dynamite DVD's commentary that his performance in the film was intended to parody Jim Brown's stiffness as an actor, like Brown's visible discomfort with trying to look relaxed during a simple romantic scene like going out on a date (it's easy to forget that White was portraying an injured ex-football star portraying a blaxploitation hero, and the stoic demeanor was partly due to his injured neck). On the animated Black Dynamite, White is committed to making Dynamite sound uncomfortable with any other moment where he has to show some vulnerability--is there anything more vulnerable-looking than singing in public?--and that commitment pays off hilariously here when Dynamite has to sing to get back home. This is what I mean when I say White is a skilled comedic actor. He doesn't treat the material like it's comedy. He treats it like it's any other dead-serious action flick he's starred in and lets the comedy come to him, just like how Dynamite lets the women come to him. Part of that is probably due to Jones' additional work as the show's voice director (I bet the direction Jones gave to White for Dynamite's musical number--or maybe White thought of it himself--was "Sing it like how Jim Brown would have sung it," which is perfect). Erykah Badu, who reprises her recurring role as Whorephanage employee Fatback Taffy (named after the Jill Scott jam, perhaps?) in "The Wizard of Watts," once praised Jones as a voice director and said he's an actor's director who "helps us bring the best out of our characters to leave us room to create who they are."

I was initially worried when Black Dynamite switched from Titmouse Inc. to MOI Animation for the animation work this season. But MOI ended up being a great substitute for Titmouse, and the Korean studio's work on "The Wizard of Watts" resulted in a remarkable-looking finale, a swirly, mindfucky '60s psychedelicization of a '70s Broadway musical that's being retold through 2015 eyes. The clips of past Black Dynamite episodes that are shown during Dynamite's climactic musical number lend "The Wizard of Watts" a sense of finality, not just as a last episode of the season (by the way, the episodes about Roots, Bob Marley and Bill Cosby were my favorites from this season) but as a possible last episode of the show as well. A third season for Black Dynamite hasn't been announced by Adult Swim yet, and if this is indeed the last episode of Black Dynamite, "The Wizard of Watts" is a hell of a way to go out. But part of me feels like the show still has more work to do. There are a lot more stories for Black Dynamite to tell and a lot more subjects from the forever-lampoonable '70s to lampoon or humorously tackle--or rather, a historically inaccurate version of the '70s that's as intentionally and amusingly inaccurate as Everybody Hates Chris and The Goldbergs' respective depictions of the '80s, although Jones' decision to give legendary Asian American Soul Train dancer Cheryl Song a fobby accent in the American Bandstand-vs.-Soul Train episode "American Band Standoff" really bugged me (she doesn't have an accent, bruh). I'm surprised that the show hasn't riffed on the 39-year-old Rocky franchise--which, by the way, will pair up Sylvester Stallone with Michael B. Jordan as both Apollo's grandson and Rocky's protégé in a spinoff movie tentatively titled Creed--because Tommy Davidson, who voices Cream Corn, does the best Stallone impression in the game. The way Davidson nails how white actors like Stallone shout when their characters get angry always kills me. I really wish the show found an opportunity for Davidson to trot out that comedic trump card of his.



And as long as police brutality or the microaggressions within something like New York Times TV desk moron Alessandra Stanley's treatment of Shonda Rhimes continue to be problems, we'll always be in need of satirical takes on these problems from unapologetically black shows like Black Dynamite. Towards the end of "The Wizard of Watts," Dynamite, who usually settles things with violence, finally manages to defeat the Wicked Bitch of the Westside--he melts to the ground, of course--after he chooses to handle the Wicked Bitch in a way that's completely different from how he usually handles his adversaries. Dynamite figures out that "the only way to defeat a crooked pig is to catch him on tape." The scene reminded me of "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant," a great 2011 track about responding to police brutality by Blue Scholars (the duo of Prometheus Brown, one of hip-hop's wittiest Filipino American rappers, and producer Sabzi, who's currently killing it as the producer half of another duo, Made in Heights). "Oskar Barnack ∞ Oscar Grant" calls for regular citizens to use cameras as their weapons against racist cops ("Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Shoot the cops/Take your cameras out your pocket, people"), and Dynamite kind of does the same thing when he defeats the Wicked Bitch, but he arrives at that decision to use a camera without speechifying about it, which would have been beneath this show. If someone told me 10 years ago that Adult Swim would become a haven for largely experimental, sharply written and sometimes socially conscious comedy from black folks, whether it's a scene like that one between Dynamite and the Wicked Bitch or a show like Black Dynamite, Jones' previous show The Boondocks, Tyler and Odd Future's Loiter Squad, Black Jesus or The Eric Andre Show, I would have said, "Sure, when cops fly."

***

"Speakeasy Rider" is a strange case where Bob's Burgers borrows from some of the staff writers' favorite sitcoms but never once feels derivative or tired. It's also a case where the episode title recycles a pun. "Speakeasy Rider" is the second Bob's Burgers episode to play around with the title Easy Rider, after "Ear-sy Rider." Not even that is tired. It's Bob's Burgers. It can get away with it--for now.

The story of siblings becoming Williams sisters-style rivals in the same sport is a familiar one. "Lisa on Ice" is one of my favorite Simpsons episodes because of its outstanding gags about the lunacy of Springfield's citizens, represented in "Lisa on Ice" by their bloodthirsty attitudes about hockey, and its poignant look at the relationship between Bart and Lisa. "Speakeasy Rider," which centers on Tina and Louise's rivalry as go-kart racers (their racing scenes are impressively animated, under the direction of Jennifer Coyle) and was written by Rich Rinaldi, contains a tension-filled dinner table scene between the sisters that's reminiscent of the "I won't have any aggressive condiment passing in this house!" scene in "Lisa on Ice." Even the ending is similar to the outcome of Bart and Lisa's conflict on the hockey rink. And the B-story of Bob and Linda trying to sneak Teddy's surprisingly good home-brewed beer past the tenacious eyes and noses of health inspectors Hugo (Sam Seder) and Ron (Ron Lynch) is essentially one of those old Cheers stories where the bar has to pretend everything's normal while it's operating without a liquor license or the bar has to pretend it's a gay one.

But "Speakeasy Rider" is unmistakably Bob's Burgers all the way, which means it's weird, weird, weird--like when Tina has conversations with her go-kart or when H. Jon Benjamin and Robert Ben Garant ad-lib an awkward picnic moment between Bob and Garant's biker character Critter--as well as warm and affecting in the least expected of places and consistently funny. The day when Bob's Burgers stops being this consistently funny is going to be a sad one, as sad as a burger without buns, unless Loren Bouchard and his crew manage to avoid shark jumping or, to borrow some racing lingo, they end up sandbagging the competition.

Why Grimm's recent glimpse into Sgt. Wu's Filipino heritage is a big deal, especially during both Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween

(Photo source: Prometheus Brown)

There's a great line early on in last weekend's Black Dynamite season premiere, where the titular '70s kung fu fighter tells his sidekicks he refuses to join them in observing the first official Black History Month ever because he "ain't celebrating his blackness on any month that the white man tells him to." Black Dynamite has a point there about history months for people of color.

Even though it's cool to have a Filipino American Heritage Month, it's also kind of silly in concept because I don't celebrate my Filipino heritage only in October--I celebrate it on the regular. I wish I could be like Black Dynamite and tell the white man that he'll never be the boss of me or my heritage. But Yakoo chose to place Filipino Heritage Month on the same month as Halloween, which is actually kind of badass. On second thought, sorry, Black Dynamite. When the haoles give us October, I can't get mad at that.

Every Halloween, or as I like to call it these days, Racists' Coming Out Day--or as Hari Kondabolu calls it, "Racist Christmas"--AFOS celebrates the holiday with "Buckets of Score," a six-hour block of original score cues from horror flicks, thrillers and supernatural procedurals, starting at 5pm Pacific. "Buckets of Score" will include highlights of Six Feet Under composer Richard Marvin's score music from the first two seasons of the Portland-based supernatural procedural Grimm, which will continue to keep Portland weird with the arrival of its fourth season this Friday on NBC.

I went from mildly liking Grimm, a show where the cast members' behind-the-scenes tweets are sometimes as entertaining as the show itself, to straight-up loving it, ever since the March airing of "Mommy Dearest." That's the episode from last season where Sgt. Wu--a reliable source of Detective Munch-style gallows humor and a colleague of the show's titular hunter of monstrous menaces, Portland cop Nick Burkhardt (David Giuntoli)--was revealed to be Pinoy, just like the actor who portrays him, Reggie Lee (I had no idea Lee was Filipino until the press coverage for "Mommy Dearest" because the surname Lee doesn't exactly scream out Filipino).

Grimm's third season is the first season where I started to watch Grimm regularly on Hulu, after a lady at an after-party for v3con in L.A. recommended to me that I check out more of Grimm. I only caught a few Grimm episodes before season 3: the pilot; an episode featuring serial guest star Jaime Ray Newman as the Blutbad (a.k.a. wolf-y) ex-girlfriend of Monroe (Silas Weir Mitchell), Nick's Blutbad guide into the complicated and multifaceted world of Wesen (pronounced "veh-sen") creatures; and the arc that introduced Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Nick's elusive and badass mom Kelly, who's a Grimm just like Nick. In most of those episodes, Sgt. Wu would show up with a quip or two about some violent crime in Portland--which he's unaware is Wesen-related--and prove to be the most likable cop character on Grimm. But Wu never had a backstory, until "Mommy Dearest," that is (Wu, who was named after Grace Wu, the head of casting at NBC, never even had a first name before the episode, which revealed it to be Drew, so that means he's Drew Wu--I take it the Grimm writers are fans of Sheng Wang).

Now this backstory for Wu is where "Mommy Dearest" takes on significance, especially during Filipino Heritage Month: as a piece of hour-long American TV that's full of Filipino American characters, it's non-stereotypical and, as someone who wishes Filipinos were better represented on American network TV and were given roles other than mail-order brides or some other subservient horseshit, I view the episode as quite a well-written breakthrough for a Filipino American regular on a TV show. Wu's backstory cleverly involves a certain part of Filipino culture that makes the synergy between Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween especially terrific: monster folklore.

When Wu was a boy, his grandma used to tell him stories about the aswang (pronounced "ass-wong"), a monster from the Philippines with a name that sounds like an Asian American male porn star but is known for an appetite that's not sexy at all: it likes to snack on the unborn babies of pregnant women. As I've said before, Wu is the only regular character on the show who's unaware that Wesen like Aswangs are real, and when his ex-girlfriend Dana (Tess Paras)--who's now married to another friend of his (Alain Uy) and is expecting a baby--is attacked at night by a creature who sounds an awful lot like an Aswang, the assault ignites Wu's suspicions that this childhood monster with the appetite of Fat Bastard from Austin Powers and the tongue of Miley Cyrus is more than just a myth.

"Mommy Dearest" episode writer Brenna Kouf, the daughter of Grimm co-creator Jim Kouf, was assigned to work a Filipino monster into an arc that would sow the seeds for Wu's discovery of Nick's secret life as a Grimm at the end of the third season, and she turned to Lee for Filipino monster myths. He suggested to her and the Grimm writing staff four monsters: the kapre, a tree demon that's fond of punking humans; the duwende, a gnome that's also a prankster; the tikbalang, a shape-shifting horse creature; and the aswang, the most lurid of the four and, of course, the monster the writing staff ultimately went with. Grimm is rarely a disturbing supernatural show--compared to something like The Walking Dead, it's actually one of the least graphic horror shows currently on the air--but when that Aswang tries to go to town on Dana's fetus in the cold open of "Mommy Dearest," man, that has to rank as one of Grimm's most disturbing monster attacks.

Grimm's aswang episode isn't just great as made-for-TV horror--it's also unexpectedly educational. What's made me enthusiastic about "Mommy Dearest," other than the juicy dramatic material for Lee and his character, is that it introduces Filipino monster folklore to American viewers, as well as Filipino American viewers who are unaware of their own culture's monster myths. In fact, I myself was never exposed to Filipino monster stories until I started reading about them on blogs like my friend Grace-Sonia Melanio's (my parents aren't exactly fans of the horror genre--and I'm not much of a fan of the genre either--so they never tried to give me nightmares with stories about tree demons or foodies with a thing for artisanal amniotic fluid).

Think of that Filipino American kid somewhere who didn't know about Filipino monsters until he or she watched "Mommy Dearest." Thanks to Grimm, that kid gets to learn about his or her culture's rich folklore--and then will probably need therapy later. But that kid is at least learning something about his or her culture. It's interesting that "Mommy Dearest"--which is worth checking out during both Filipino Heritage Month and Halloween season (Grimm isn't streamable on Netflix, but the third-season Blu-rays are available to rent there)--has aired during a year when the broadcast networks have made significant strides in fixing their previously lousy track record with diversity (please be dope, Fresh Off the Boat), and even though it's just a Pinoy battling a Filipino monster, it's progress, man.

Selections from Grimm's first-and-second-season score album will be featured during "Buckets of Score" at 5pm Pacific on October 31 on AFOS.

The last five things I've written over at Word Is Bond

Rocky Rivera (pictured with her "GRLZ" and "Ain't No Way" collaborators DJ Roza and Irie Eyez) is one of the artists whose albums I most recently reviewed for Word Is Bond. I'm glad to have been made a part of WIB's review team in 2013.

Shad, Flying Colours (November 7, 2013)
"Top it off with a well-chosen Jay Z sample hook and you have another tuneful banger along the lines of 2010's 'Rose Garden,' which was produced by returning beatmaker DJ T Lo, as well as one of many highlights of Flying Colours. Good thing Shad and Skratch Bastid sampled one of Hov's verses from the enjoyable 'Otis' instead of Hov's really imaginative 'Cake cake cake cake cake cake' verse from Drake's 'Pound Cake.'"

Rocky Rivera, Gangster of Love (November 12, 2013)
"As usual, executive producer and Beatrock label founder Fatgums works his production magic on another solid-sounding Beatrock album, which is also an album we need right now: a fierce antidote to what author Jeff Chang referred to as a painful summer for racial justice, the summer of such delightful moments as the Zimmerman acquittal and Levy Tran's 'Asian Girlz' debacle. Rocky is one Asian girl--or rather, woman--who doesn't play that 'I love your sticky rice' shit."

"10 Hilarious Rapper Impressions" (November 25, 2013)
"Whether it's Pharoah's impression of Kendrick's flow, which seems to have been inspired by K.Dot's killer guest verse on DJ Khaled's 'They Ready,' or former MADtv regular Aries Spears turning DMX into Sally whenever she orders food in When Harry Met Sally, these impressions are so entertaining that for a few minutes, they've made me briefly forget about the dual heartbreak of the creative stagnancy of a late-night show I grew up watching and the unjust demise of a late-night show that could have become a game-changer for progressively minded comedians of color."

Rapsody introduces a little anarchy in her video for "Dark Knights."

"12 Great Albums That We Didn't Review This Year" (December 19, 2013; co-written with Hardeep, Matticus Finch and Paddy)
"'Footnote: Kendrick ain't mention no females! Rapsody, we gotta change that!,' says DJ Drama during the Raleigh spitter's 2013 mixtape. With bangers like 'Lonely Thoughts,' which features a laugh-out-loud funny guest verse by Chance the Rapper, and the Dark Knight Rises-inspired 'Dark Knights,' which has Rapsody and Wale dropping the nerdiest Batman references outside of nerdcore, Rapsody proves she belongs on Kendrick's infamous 'Control' list of the game's most skilled MCs."

"Music Videos That Stood Out In 2013" (December 25, 2013)
"Director Patricio Ginelsa picks up on the tune's fake '90s vibe and surrounds Bambu and Geo with animated graphics straight out of Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock's 'It Takes Two' video and backup dancers with moves from old Queen Latifah videos. You keep thinking, 'Yo, is Blossom gonna Cabbage Patch her way onto the set at some point?' The 'Books' video could have just consisted of the '90s R&B throwback material, and it would have been a decent video. But no, Ginelsa had to throw in footage of Bambu and Geo starring in a fake sitcom about an undocumented Filipino immigrant called Tago ng Tago (it's Tagalog for 'always hiding'), and that turned a decent video into a great one."

The year 2012, as told through tweets I favorited

AFOS, which I finally upgraded from mono to stereo earlier this month, was occasionally mentioned on Twitter by other people in 2012, either to express their disappointment in iTunes dumping AFOS from its station list (another reason to dislike iTunes, but I can't really do anything about their decision to dump AFOS) or to praise my station for streaming movie themes they enjoyed hearing. Author Scott Pearson, a contributor to Simon & Schuster's Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Star Trek: Myriad Universes anthologies, did both:

The AFOS blog's new "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner" column received a few shout-outs and retweets on Twitter, mostly from staffers at Titmouse because I said a few nice things about the animation studio's collabos with Disney: Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja and the even more impressive--and anti-authoritarian--Motorcity. The latter action cartoon is a one-season wonder that looks remarkably like a big-budget animated feature film each week and is another unfortunate casualty in a TV landscape that hasn't been kind lately to true sci-fi like Motorcity. Alyssa Rosenberg posted a piece on ThinkProgress where she lamented the lack of true sci-fi shows on the currently-more-fantasy-oriented--and crap-oriented--Syfy. Motorcity, which was slept on by even the few TV critics out there who regularly cover animated shows, was exactly the kind of sci-fi show Rosenberg was clamoring for.

I favorited Motorcity writer George Krstic's tweet about my review of his "Power Trip" episode mainly because of the joke he cracked about himself and his colleagues:

Enough about me. What about the rest of 2012?

(Most year-end lists can make for boring and grueling reading. Reflecting on the past year by skimming through tweets I favorited is turning into an entertaining alternative from scrolling through endless year-end articles and think pieces.)

Quite a bit of fun resulted on Twitter from the much-hyped second season of Downton Abbey (I once tweeted, "Note to self: Don't forget to add #DowntonAbbey to the list of 'Shit White People Like That I Don't Understand the Appeal Of.'"):

Artists whom I've been giving heavy airplay to on AFOS got the chance to kick it with their idols:

There was 2 Broke Girls showrunner Michael Patrick King's stupid defense of the racist material that's being written for the Korean Long Duk Dong on the show, or as GQ writer Lauren Bans amusingly calls the openly gay King's brand of humor, "gaycism":

Ignorance came not just from sitcom joke writers but also from TV stars and, as usual, the far right:

There was Linsanity (and the inevitable and stupid racial slurs in response to the rise of the NBA's first Asian American star player):

There was also the fall of aging (and disappointingly homophobic) champ Manny Pacquiao:

Young, gifted and brown: A Filipino American Heritage Month playlist

Bambu (left) and Prometheus Brown (right) are The Bar. (Photo source: Prometheus Brown)

As the National Film Society reminds us below this graf, October is Filipino American Heritage Month, so I've compiled my favorite tracks on Spotify by great Filipino American artists like DJ QBert, Prometheus Brown, a.k.a. Geo, and half-Pinoy soulman Joe Bataan. Also included are some new cuts by L.A. rapper/activist Bambu, whose latest album .​.​.​ one rifle per family. dropped earlier this month.



Bambu's best track, the Jackson 5-sampling "Misused" from 2008's … exact change…, is addressed to his son (who was two years old at the time Bambu was interviewed here), and it boldly decries the Catholic Church--the church of choice for most Filipinos who weren't born here in America--for its Eurocentricism. He teamed up with the Seattle-based Geo to form The Bar in last year's outstanding Prometheus Brown & Bambu Walk Into a Bar. So many conscious rappers tend to be humorless, which can be a chore to listen to, but the pairing of Bambu and Geo proves not all of them are humorless, especially during "Rashida Jones," The Bar's ode to the lovely Parks and Rec star and now Celeste and Jesse Forever screenwriter.

The Pixies' "Vamos" is full of delightfully batshit crazy guitar work by Joey Santiago. On the instrumental side, I wish Spotify contained "The Role Traversal" by the now-defunct post-rock band From Monument to Masses. I'd love to use "The Role Traversal" at the end of a film if I ever direct one someday. In that track's place is From Monument to Masses' Noam Chomsky-sampling "Sharpshooter."

I'm not a fan of Bruno Mars or the power ballad sound that he and other Pinoy performers like current Journey lead singer Arnel Pineda and several female American Idol contestants are known for, but Mars' new single "Locked Out of Heaven" doesn't sound too bad and appears to be a slight shift from the power ballad sound. Also, I'm glad that this week, the half-Pinoy writer of Cee Lo Green's "Fuck You" will be the first Pinoy guest host in SNL history (interestingly, this will take place a week after SNL performed yet another cringeworthy sketch that brings to light a problem that's plagued this show long before I started watching it in the late '80s: the lack of diversity in the cast, even though this iPhone 5 sketch, in which mistreated and snarky Chinese Foxconn laborers were played by non-Chinese actors, sided with the Chinese characters instead of making them the butt of the joke). Mars' SNL milestone happens to occur during Filipino American Heritage Month, which is funny because we Filipinos aren't usually known for our impeccable timing.

Complete tracklist after the jump...

Paramount: 100 years of crazy juice

Paramount is a studio full of huge missteps like Richard Gere dancing around in a diaper and the stupidly whitewashed live-action adaptation of its sister company Nickelodeon's animated Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise. It's also a studio that's responsible for many of my favorite movies (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 1999's Election).

All year long, Paramount has been celebrating its 100th anniversary. Because the Saturday after next is the date when one of Paramount's most popular properties, Star Trek, made its debut on NBC (46 years ago, to be exact), I'm posting a 100th anniversary playlist consisting of original themes from my favorite Paramount movies and shows (Star Trek: First Contact, Taxi) and original themes I like that come from Paramount movies I've never seen (Fear Is the Key, Three Tough Guys) or Paramount movies I don't care for (the late Tony Scott's Top Gun).

I'm glad that Spotify carries Paramount Pictures' 90th Anniversary Memorable Scores, an impressive 2002 Sony Classical comp, even though it contains cues from Forrest Gump and Titanic, two other Paramount smash hits I don't care for. However, I'm a little bummed that Spotify doesn't carry the songs from South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut or the scores from Face/Off, Election, Zodiac, Vertigo, Psycho, the original Italian Job, Once Upon a Time in the West, Star Trek II and the first J.J. Abrams Trek movie. Spotify carries re-recordings of Bernard Herrmann's Vertigo and Psycho pieces, The Italian Job's "Getta Bloomin' Move On," Ennio Morricone's Once Upon a Time in the West themes, James Horner's Trek II cues, Michael Giacchino's Trek cues, Dave Grusin's Three Days of the Condor theme and Neal Hefti's enjoyably loungy theme from the Odd Couple movie and TV series, but I'm not using them. I hate most film and TV score re-recordings.

Almost all these score re-recordings on Spotify are tinnily performed on cheap synthesizers, they come from labels I've never heard of and they suck gigantic J.J. Abrams red balls. That's why there are no re-recordings on this three-hour "Paramount: 100 Years of Crazy Juice" playlist, even though Billy May's cover of the Odd Couple theme isn't bad because it's, well, Billy May.

The playlist goes in chronological order from 1958 to the present day, but it kicks off with a '90s piece: one of my all-time favorite joints, Eric B. and Rakim's "Juice (Know the Ledge)" from Paramount's 1992 Tupac Shakur movie Juice, the first directorial effort from former Spike Lee cinematographer and frequent episodic cable TV director Ernest Dickerson. Juice's Hank Shocklee-produced soundtrack is a terrific snapshot of hip-hop and R&B in the early '90s (when Shocklee and his Bomb Squad were in their prime as beatmakers) and has aged remarkably well. The film itself isn't quite a masterpiece. It would probably be a more intriguing film if I watched it again, but in black-and-white instead of color, a trick I learned from rapper Prometheus Brown.

"I gave Juice the homemade noir treatment and discovered a whole nother film underneath the film's already muted colors. Stripped down to monochrome, New York becomes Gotham. Tupac's dark portrayal of Bishop is intensified," wrote Geo back when he used to write at length about movies on his blog (I wish Prometheus hadn't abandoned film criticism because we need more film critics of color, but between his touring schedule and balancing two bands at the same time, it's understandable).

"The DJ battle scenes in the club no longer look like a 90s MTV dance show but more like a classic rap video," continued Prometheus in his Juice post. "Omar Epps's scratching, however, remains artificial. Can't desaturate that."

Complete tracklist after the jump...

Slept-On in Seattle: Sunday Night Sound Session focuses on the most underrated or least hackneyed hip-hop and soul tracks

Sunday Night Sound Session--a Seattle terrestrial radio show I just discovered via Seattle's own Prometheus Brown after he linked to his SNSS guest appearance with another Pinoy rapper, the L.A.-based Bambu, who formed with Prometheus the new duo The Bar--is currently restoring my faith in hip-hop and making me realize that maybe two percent of terrestrial radio ain't so bad. I recently said, "[The] proclamation that conscious hip-hop is dead was premature. It's still out there. You just have to know where to look." Declared by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in 2010 as "The best radio show you've never heard," despite airing on "a corporate behemoth with a playlist as deep as a puddle" (the Clear Channel-owned Seattle hip-hop/R&B station KUBE 93), hosts DJ Hyphen and J. Moore's program, which turns seven years old this month, is one such spot that's giving exposure to conscious hip-hop.

One particular conscious hip-hop track during SNSS that got my attention was Reef the Lost Cauze's "The Prey (For Trayvon Martin & My Son)," a powerful Menace II Society-sampling track in which the unsigned Philly rapper wonders about what he has to tell his one and a half-year-old son as he raises him in a society still marred by racial violence ("People are gonna hate your skin and try to ruin you/And now I gotta tell him that they just might shoot at you").

Sunday Night Sound Session co-hosts DJ Hyphen (left) and J. Moore (right)

SNSS also bumps alt-R&B (the Pharrell Williams-produced "Live Your Life" by up-and-coming Malaysian singer Yuna is a recent SNSS playlist favorite, as well as a new favorite of mine, thanks to SNSS) and the best in mainstream hip-hop. But as the Seattle P-I notes, "You won't hear the latest from 50 Cent here; instead Hyphen and Moore focus on artists that generally aren't part of the everyday KUBE lineup." They're also not afraid to say a less-than-favorable thing or two about a mainstream track that's a bit commercial-sounding for their tastes or point out a hook or a producer's touch from a "Throwback of the Week" (a chune from the '90s or early '00s) that hasn't quite aged well.

I've been catching up to SNSS via archived episodes on Hyphen's The Audacity of Dope site. The show's so tight I don't even mind the Clear Channel-mandated audio dropouts to censor profanity or clunky-sounding radio edits of singles a la "This town like a great big chicken jus' waiting to get plucked."

UPDATE: I almost forgot that Hyphen once concluded an SNSS episode with French electro-house musician Kavinsky's excellent 2010 track "Nightcall" because the song grabbed his attention during the opening credits of Drive. Hyphen amusingly introed "Nightcall" with, "Turn it up. Ride out to this. Don't re-enact the movie Drive though." The appearance of the Drive opening title theme and Hyphen's Drive joke are a couple more reasons to love SNSS.